Word: memoire
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...rare attributes raise The Making of a Public Man beyond the category of benign memoir. One is Linowitz's talent for spare, telling portraits. Among them: Chester Carlson, the arthritic, scholarly patent attorney who, in a one-room laboratory behind a beauty parlor in Astoria, Queens, invented the process that made Xerox a name to copy. Linowitz tells how, as the firm's lawyer and later its chairman, he helped Carlson and Joseph Wilson, an impossibly energetic Rochester businessman, launch a product that ended up creating its own demand. The now ubiquitous machine, says Linowitz, "was a case where invention...
...comparison, World's Fair is downright guarded. Doctorow calls it a novel. But the book reads like a memoir, and is unmistakably based on the author's early boyhood in the Bronx. The account begins with a bed wetting in the middle of the Depression and ends on the eve of World War II with a nine-year-old Edgar Altschuler burying a cardboard time capsule containing a Tom Mix decoder badge, his school report on the life of F.D.R., a harmonica and a pair of Tootsy Toy lead rocket ships, "to show I had foreseen the future...
...father remains silent and remote. Even the Bronx is incompletely perceived. Granted that it is not New York City's most glamorous borough, it is home to the Yankees and one of the world's great zoos. Neither attraction appears in the book, understandable if Doctorow had written a memoir, but a lost opportunity in a novel about growing up with "King Kong" Keller and other great apes in the neighborhood. --By R.Z. Sheppard
...dubious advice for a writer. From James Joyce to Tennessee Williams, from Virginia Woolf to Mary Gordon, modern literature has thrived on an undercurrent of patricide and matricide. Monstrous parents, it seems, are what gifted children barely survive in order to write about them with inspired resentment. Loving memoirs tend to rank second only to corporate histories of tool-and-die companies as the kind of book any reader can put down. In the face of this, Wilfrid Sheed, a witty, acerbic critic and novelist (Office Politics, Transatlantic Blues), has managed to compose a mellow family chronicle that turns literary...
BORN. To Candice Bergen, 39, cool, elegant blond actress (Carnal Knowledge, Rich and Famous) and author of a best-selling memoir (Knock Wood) about her life as Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's daughter; and her husband Louis Malle, 53, French director (Lacombe, Lucien, Atlantic City); their first child (Malle has two children from a previous marriage), a daughter; in New York City. Name: Chloe. Weight...